I'm extremely excited today to see Google release gRPC, a new high-performance, low-latency, cross-platform RPC framework, alongside with the latest version of Protocol Buffers, as fully open-source software.

Read the blog post below for an overview, then visit grpc.io and check out the source itself on github.com/grpc to get started.

HUGE congrats to +Mugur Marculescu and the amazing engineering team behind the release! I realize they're just getting started, but this is already a major milestone for the effort. Nice!﻿

Hey Eugene - the gRPC protocol itself is abstractly specified and should be able to be layered on top of near any wire format. There's lots of stuff we've talked about there too: UDP based protocols are especially interesting for slower long-haul links for instance.

We felt like HTTP/2 matched up with what we wanted in a wire format for TCP anyway though, and so we started there. In the process we get something that will be easy to proxy through any HTTP/2 front end, which seems good for folks piecing together infrastructure in an open source environment.

If serial lines are important for you, checkout the API in the grpc/grpc repo under src/core/iomgr/endpoint.h. We internally don't care much about TCP or not, and it ought to be less than a days work to bring up HTTP/2 over plaintext over a serial link and run gRPC. HTTP/2 there brings some nice flow control properties and actually seems (to me) to be a great fit again.﻿

Iwould like to deal with the Islamic subject theoretical yFor master degree or PhD .one of reason is that my lovely daughter Zena. 6 years old killedd by Iraqi army,she'ing lights on crimes that done by Muslims sines appering the bloody ( Mohamed )﻿

Over the weekend we watched Jack Ryan : Shadow Recruit on Netflix (terrible movie, just...don't), and the premise—*spoiler alert*—is that Russia would be bankrupted and start a war if a new Turkish oil pipeline forced prices below $79 a barrel, and something something something Chris Pine hacked into a mainframe and did some sweet karate moves against an billionaire oligarch.

The "Rule of Zero" is a useful, and somewhat obvious now that he mentions it, C++11 technique for avoiding writing potentially error-prone custom copy or move constructors for container classes that have managed resources as members, simply by holding a RAII-managed std::unique_pointer with an appropriate Deleter instead.

What happens when you combine a detailed-obsessed master craftsman like Adam Savage with the seemingly impossible challenge of precisely recreating the iconic hedge maze from Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece, The Shining? Brilliance happens, that's what.

After figuring out a way to get it shipped quickly (goo.gl/BrPc8t), I received the Wifi-only Kindle Voyage last night. Here are my first impressions:

Pros:

- Smallest and lightest kindle ever. At 180 grams, I don't think arm strain will ever be a concern. Easily fits in the back pocket of my jeans or the side pocket of my jacket.

- If you like e-ink—and I do—then this is as good as you've ever seen, and it can be read comfortably for as long as you'd be able to read a paper book.

- It's an Amazon Kindle, so the book selection and book prices are as good as anywhere, and they've pretty much nailed the multi-device shopping and reading experience (web, kindle, android and ios apps).

- Whispersync, which now also works to sync your place between text Kindle books and Audible audiobooks, is better than anything else. It just works.

- Screen redraws are now fast to the point that changing pages feels immediate, unless you're flipping through many at a time.

- Battery life. Of course I barely drained at all it in the last 12 hours of use, but it's safe to say this Kindle will be as good as all the ones before.

- It arrives signed-in and ready to go. I love that.

Mixed:

- I honestly expected more of the 300 DPI screen. I feel like I can still see rough edges around the fonts. Not that the e-ink screen was ever bad in that respect, I'm just surprised it's not more of an upgrade.

- The blotchiness of the Paperwhite's backlighting is gone, but it's replaced by just a bit of a gradual and inconsistent gradient. Better, but not perfect.

- I don't think Caecilia is really that nice a font.

- The new tactile buttons are fantastic if you are holding it in exactly the right way (with your thumb pads over the full button, fingers curled around the back) but inconsistent at best in any other position. I'm sure I'll get used to it, though.

- No color screen. I realize there will almost certainly never be a color e-ink screen, but I switched back to the Kindle app on my Nexus 7 for a while last night because I was reading a technical book that didn't work well in greyscale. This is a non-issue for most books, though.

- I find 90% of the extra features—the dictionary, highlighting, etc—to be marginal at best on the e-ink capacitive touchscreen because of crazy high latency, inconsistent hit targets, and (obviously) glacial framerates. I use those often on the Nexus 7 Kindle App, though, so they're not bad features, just less useful here.

Cons:

- The "Getting Started" guide is unforgivable. Unbelievably long. And unskippable. It happens after you sign in, too, so it already knows I've been using a Kindle since the first one ever made. I got it, thanks.

- Auto-light-leveling isn't what I hoped for. So far it's never felt right, either while reading in bed, or reading at the table at breakfast, but it's not quite bad enough to go in and disable it. Maybe this can be patched?

- $220

Verdict:

If you already have a Paperwhite, I don't necessarily think it's worth the upgrade. If you don't have a Kindle yet and want an e-ink device, maybe get a Paperwhite instead at half the price. I plan to keep using the Voyage daily rather than sell it and go back, though. While it's the best e-ink e-reader ever made, I perhaps had higher expectations which weren't quite met.﻿

Watch what happens when you trust a freeware site like download.com. The whole story reads like an ad for a Chromebook.

A shame, too, as I personally run and like Windows. But you need to be hyper-vigilant to survive, given all the crapware, malware, bloatware, and just plain awfulness out there, all waiting to prey on the non-technical.

We installed the top 10 apps from Download.com, and you’ll never believe what happened! Well… I guess maybe you might have a good guess. Awful things. Awful things are what happens. Join us for the fun!

+Brie Harrison I wasn't the author; I just posted a link to it here. I do think the article is making the rounds, though. That said, I'm pretty sure people at CNET already know. It's not like the problem is subtle.﻿

I recently read about the Seattle "rain shadow" effect caused by the Olympic mountain range, and it seemed to be in full force today, so I headed over to http://forecast.io to take a look at their precipitation animations. Sure enough, we were spared the worst of the wet weather in a vivid way. See the screen capture below.